Word: sunning
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Perhaps the most exciting thing about the discovery of GJ 1214b is that the planet was found at all. Planet hunters usually focus their attention on Sun-like stars - that is, large and hot - on the assumption that if you're looking for life, you should look in a place that is as similar to our solar system as possible. Charbonneau, however, focused on about 2,000 small, dim, red stars known as M-dwarfs, nearby Earth. M-dwarfs are much more numerous than Sun-like stars; of the 300 stars closest to Earth, says Charbonneau...
Charbonneau's group isn't the only one looking. An international consortium of observatories just announced the discovery of several other super-Earths around Sun-like stars, though these new planets are far too hot to sustain life and too far away to be able to study. Separately, NASA's Kepler Mission will present the first results of its planet search at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington in January. "[The Kepler team] has already submitted 28 scientific papers based on 43 days of data or less," says MIT planet theorist Sara Seager. "It's going...
...member in 2004, even though Greek Cypriots had rejected a painstakingly crafted U.N. peace plan in a referendum vote just prior. (Turkish Cypriots voted yes.) As a result, the Greek-Cypriot republic lost any incentive it might have had to speed up negotiations. (Read: "On the Run in Cyprus' Sun...
...them. (Their approval ratings are 18% and 28%, respectively.) This state of affairs is alternately described as the end of civilization or America's bright future, depending on whom you ask. Driving around the state, you'd never know that California was on the brink of apocalypse: the sun is shining and the lawns are bright green, even in the desert, so it's as tempting to believe the optimists as it is the hysterics...
...late-November afternoon sun bore down on the park in downtown Kampala, and all along the benches, Ugandan office workers took their siestas. There could have been no less likely setting for criminal conspiracies to topple an East African state. Still, the doctor's voice dropped a notch when an office worker in a brown suit settled in close by. The medic shifted a battered fedora over his eyes. "I am the gay doctor," the physician whispered to me, making sure nobody around heard. He talked about the gay and lesbian couples who go to his office to avoid ridicule...